Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse

Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse

The Poems in Verse is Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé’s theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” the Poésies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson’s English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time — these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarméan complexity. With The Poems in Verse, Mallarmé’s voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry.

The moon grew solemn. Seraphim in tears
dreaming, the bow held in their fingers, in the calm
of vaporous flowers, drew from fainting viols
white sobs to glide above the blue corollas
— it was the blessèd day of your first kiss.
My reverie, that loves to martyr me,
knowingly got drunk on the scent of sadness
that, even without regret or a bitter aftertaste, is left
by the harvest of a dream in the heart that harvested.
I wandered, then, my eyes fixed on the cobbles
when, with the sun in your hair, in the street,
in the evening, you appeared before me laughing
and my mind’s eye saw the fairy with the cap of light
who passed over the nights of my spoiled childhood,
always allowing a snowstorm from her half-closed hands
of white bouquets of scented stars to fall.